// THE VERGE — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Tesla Robotaxis appear to go fully unsupervised in Austin ahead of Cybercab launch
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Over the past two weeks, all 170 Tesla Robotaxi rides in Austin monitored by Robotaxi Tracker were unsupervised.
Over the past two weeks, all 170 Tesla Robotaxi rides in Austin monitored by Robotaxi Tracker were unsupervised.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Seven months after Elon Musk announced that Tesla Robotaxis in Austin were operating without human safety monitors onboard, the city’s service appears to have finally gone fully driverless.
Over the past two weeks, all 170 Tesla Robotaxi rides in Austin monitored by the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker were unsupervised, the site’s creator, Ethan McKanna, told The Verge. Those rides involved 54 different cars. McKanna has also seen a sharp increase in unsupervised Robotaxis elsewhere, particularly Dallas and Houston, where roughly 30 driverless Teslas have been operating over the past week.
That’s a substantial change from earlier this summer, when Tesla’s unsupervised fleet appeared to be stagnating or even shrinking. Robotaxi Tracker showed just 28 active unsupervised vehicles across six Texas and Florida markets as recently as last week. In other words, McKanna has now identified nearly twice as many unsupervised Teslas in Austin alone as his tracker had previously shown across all six markets.
Some of the apparent jump reflects better data. McKanna, who spent this summer interning with Tesla’s Robotaxi team, said some of the metrics on his site had been lagging. After revising the sources feeding Robotaxi Tracker — which draws primarily on app users automatically logging their rides, along with other crowdsourced and public information — he found that more vehicles were operating unsupervised than the site had previously reflected. He’s currently updating the site to incorporate the revised data.